It's an interesting article, although I have a few criticisms of Natapoff'sanalysis. Firstly, the notion of voter power, is it meaningful? It doesn'tseem to be to me. Secondly, assuming that it is meaningful, it seems(although it's not entirely clear from the article) that he is comparing theexpected voting power of a randomly chosen individual in the two systemsunder consideration, and it isn't clear that this is the best comparison(how about comparing the minimum voting powers as would be suggested by aminimax idea?).

I came up with an interesting idea which I haven't really had much time toplay with yet, the idea of "random democracy". Rather than choosing thepresident (or whatever) based on who has the most votes (be they electoralcollege or individual votes), you get everyone to vote, and then yourandomly (uniformly) select an individual vote from all the votes cast andmake the decision based solely on that. Statistically speaking it's superiorto the "maximum number of votes" principle, because everyone's vote is(statistically) of exactly equal value, whereas this isn't true in atraditional system (for example, voting for Nader effectively nullifies yourvote as far as choosing the president is concerned, although it does serveanother purpose). Of course, there are problems with this system, but Ithink it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

Dan Goodman

Chip Eastham <chip_eastham@my-deja.com> wrote in messagenews://8uhak9$8vu$1@nnrp1.deja.com...>>> Check out this nontechnical discussion of a mathematical analysis of> the democratic virtue of the Electoral College in choosing the U.S.> Presidents:>> http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm>> Regards,> Chip>>> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/> Before you buy.